Neural Mechanisms of Music, Singing, and Dancing
Neural Mechanisms of Music, Singing, and Dancing
Song and dance have been important components of human culture for millennia. Although song and dance, and closely related music psychological processes, rely on and support a broad range of behavioral and neural functions, recent work by cognitive neuroscientists has started to shed light on the brain mechanisms that underlie the perception and production of song and dance. This chapter enumerates processes and functions of song that span multiple timescales, ranging from articulatory processes at the scale of tens and hundreds of milliseconds to narrative and cultural processes which span minutes to years. A meta-analysis of pertinent functional neuroimaging studies identifies brain areas of interest for future studies. Although limited by the scope of the relatively small number of studies that have examined song-related processes, the meta-analysis contributes to a framework for thinking about these processes in terms of perception–action cycles. To date, most research on song has focused on the integration of linguistic and musical elements, whether in the binding together of pitch and syllables or, at a more temporally extended level, in the binding of melodies and lyrics. Often this has been with an eye toward the question of whether melodic information facilitates retention of linguistic information, particularly in individuals who have suffered a neurological insult. Evidence supports a view that merging novel linguistic and melodic information is an effortful process, one that is dependent on the context in which the information is associated, with a social context aiding retention. This observation provides an intriguing link between cognitive processes in the individual and the social as well as cultural functions that song and dance ultimately serve. Published in the Strungmann Forum Reports Series.
Keywords: neuralfoundations of music, dance, song, neuroimaging, perception, action, narrative
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